


all the stars we can see

by paox



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: AU, Gen, Multi, Post-Apocalypse, Zombie Apocalypse, ydyd
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-04-19 00:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14225493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paox/pseuds/paox
Summary: Nine strangers, infected by an slow-spreading undead plague, are thrown into the empty, endless wasteland to survive. With only one another to rely on, they have to try to survive, but death looms on the horizon and with danger around every corner, the world is more perilous than ever before. One in the group may not be what he seems, and as mistrust spreads and the infection grows, will any of this unconventional new family survive?(YDYD Apocalypse AU)





	all the stars we can see

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Illusion_Of_Sea_Axes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Illusion_Of_Sea_Axes/gifts).



**** “Fuck you!  _ Fuck all of you! _ All of you deserve to end up out here too!”

The man with the red hair - more of a boy, really, not much over twenty - is yelling. He has been since they carted him onto the plane, shoving him into the hold, and the whole way here he pounded his fists on the walls until his knuckles bled. In the silence of the journey, his anger was a fire in the dull, hollow shock that had filled the air. Nobody else even had sense of presence to speak.

That feeling is still here, hanging in the air even as the plane closes its doors and they all stand on the sand, clustered together as the wind whips around them. The propellers start whirring and the plane begins to roll forward through the dust, throwing up sand in a cloud that makes everything turn a dull, hopeless off-white around them as it fills the air, rolling across the desert ground. Shafts of light filter through the smog and Geoff can see, through the sand hanging on the air like smoke, the redhead running after the plane, screaming at the top of his lungs, cursing them and the New Republic and everything the world has become. In their little cluster, nobody moves for a long moment.

The plane takes off, rising and rising, up and up and up. It soars out of the dust and the heat, away from the wasteland, leaving them behind for good. Geoff watches it until it’s completely out of sight, a tiny black speck in the sky, and only then does the world fade back into reality. He releases all the air he’s been holding in his lungs for an eternity and glances around, taking in the group around him, taking in the wasteland they’ve been left in. 

All of the hope he might have been able to hang onto rushes away in an instant. 

There’s nothing but sand and rubble in every direction. The whole world is a wide, dusty stretch of muddy, pale grey, like all of the color has been sucked from the sand, leaving it dry and raw and lifeless. There are skeletons of buildings here and there, isolated and dark like bodies with their outsides scraped away down to the bone, but there are no roads - they’ve all long-since been concealed by sand and age. Everything is empty and dead. The wind howls through the desert in the distance like a wail, ripping up sand, tearing through the bony frames of houses with a vengeance. 

_ This is hell. This is hell, and we’re all going to die here _ .

Beside Geoff, somebody mutters, “Bloody ‘ell.”

And just like that, their little cluster breaks up. Everybody scatters, like spooked cats, spreading out and raising their guards and staring around at the strangers dropped into this hell with them, wide-eyed. Geoff stumbles back, hand flying to his waist, but knife was taken off him before he was hauled onto the plane and his hand closes around empty air.  _ Fuck _ .

“Now, let’s just all calm down-” a bearded man starts to say-

Another guy suddenly lunges forwards, grabbing at something on the ground, and somebody else goes for it a second later, A scuffle breaks out, a mess of pushing and shoving and squawking on the desert floor - the first guy emerges victorious, clutching a piece of sharp, jagged glass. The second guy, blonde, lunges for it, and as the first one goes to shove him down, somebody else barrels into their fight. 

It’s the boy from before - red hair, bloody knuckles. He decks the guy who got the glass, the blood on his knuckles spraying in flecks across the sand, and the guy goes down like a stone. Then, red-hair grabs blondie and hauls him to his feet, dusting him off, checking him for injuries. 

“You alright, boi?”

“Yeah, I’m alright. Glad you got in there, though. Thanks, boi!” Blondie sounds british. 

“No problem, Gav-” red-hair glances around. “Where’s Lindsay?”

“Here!” A redheaded girl rushes to them from a few feet away. She’s pretty, and young. “You know, you didn’t need to run after the plane-”

Red-hair doesn’t listen to her. “You’re okay, too, right?” He checks her like he did the blonde one, and there’s a strange closeness between the three that makes Geoff’s heart ache. 

“Yeah, I’m fine-”

If nobody else is going to do it, he might as well. Geoff steps forwards, sighing. “Alright, alright, maybe we should come up with some kind of plan-”

Immediately, red-hair is on his guard again. He growls like a rottweiler, pushes the other two behind him and whirls around. “Who the hell said we’re staying with you?! Look, us three are getting the hell out of here, no way in hell are we playing happy families with some assholes we don’t even know in the middle of the Empty.”

Geoff raises his hands. “Alright, asshole, I was only asking! Look, maybe a few pairs of eyes are better than one out here.”

“We’ll all be dead in a few weeks anyway.” Red-scowls, turns around. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

“Michael-” the girl, Lindsay, grabs his arm. “Look, let’s just see what these guys have to say, maybe we can stay with them for a while.”

“Seriously?! Lindsay-”

“I think he’s right.” Everybody turns to look at the one who said it - a young man, like the trio, with dark hair and eyes and pale skin. He flushes. “Look, I don’t know, maybe we should just split up- I mean, it would suck to get attached when we’re all going to be dead soon-”

Nearly everybody flinches. Nevertheless, Geoff persists. He doesn’t like the thought of dying alone out here. “Look, if all of you want to spend your last weeks on earth alone, that’s fine by me.”

“Can we stop talking about the death thing?” blondie asks, pale. “We get it - we’re going to be dead soon - bloody hell, don’t keep mentioning it.”

Nobody speaks for a moment, the air thick and tense. The dust has settled around them, in people’s hair and on their clothes, and Geoff’s eyes are itching. 

“It’s going to get dark soon,” somebody says - the bearded man. A sensible guy, apparently. “Maybe we should try to find cover. Sort out what we want to do in the morning.”

“Sounds like a good idea.” Geoff looks around. “Unless anybody wants to stay out here in the dark.”

Apparently, nobody does. There are a few muted nods, and after exchanging glances with the other two, red-hair sighs and nods irritably. He looks like an asshole, but Geoff doesn’t tell him that. There are about nine or ten of them in the group altogether: the trio, Geoff, beard, the dark-haired guy, the one who got knocked out, a small, bald guy, and another guy with a hard jaw and dark blue eyes. They traipse through the desert in silence for a while, looking around, huddled together in little clumps against the wind. The bearded guy carries the one red-hair knocked out. Nobody speaks. 

Night falls fast. Geoff’s feet are aching - when he left the house this morning, with no idea that he would end up here of all places, he happened to put on the one pair of shoes he owns that don’t fit him too well. He doesn’t complain. Even after they’ve been walking for an hour, still in uncomfortable silence, desert stretches in all directions around them. It seems endless. Geoff thinks that maybe it is. 

Finally, they find a place to sleep, just as the night is closing in. There’s a little place on the side of the torn-up remnants of a road that might have once been a cottage. The roof is in pieces, all the windows cracked or shattered, and limescale creeps up the walls like a damp infection. Trudging through the dry, colourless sand, Geoff follows his new companions in. Somebody tries the lightswitch, maybe for a joke. Nothing happens. Geoff’s headache gets worse. 

They sit in the living room together for a while, after checking the house for infected. There’s some blood on one of the walls. Nobody mentions it. Red-hair  _ (Michael, _ his name is, and he really is an angry prick) sits on one of the couches, Lindsay’s head on one of his shoulders and the brit leaning on the other. All three of them are staring into space, hollow looks on their faces, like they’ve lost everything they could have possibly believed in. They probably have. 

The others are clustered around, too. Nobody knows quite what to do. They go through introductions and Geoff knows that he’s going to forget all of their names at least five times. The bearded one is called Jack, and he’s kind and practical. The guy with blue eyes is Ryan, and he puts Geoff on edge. There’s another guy, short and stocky, called Jeremy - he’s just a kid too, scared and shocked, and Geoff feels bad for him. Then there’s Lindsay, Michael and Gavin, the trio. All three of them have matching wedding rings. Nobody comments. 

After that, there’s Trevor, the pale one with dark hair. He still seems on-edge, like all of them do. The other guy is called Alfredo, dark-haired and dark-skinned with a black eye where Michael punched him, and he’s friendly and silly and seems not to care about their shitty situation in the slightest. Geoff wishes he was able to care that little. His bite aches periodically, like a throbbing itch that won’t go away. 

“Shouldn’t somebody… y’know, go on watch or something?” Trevor asks after a while, though he hardly looks like he’s volunteering. “You know. In case one of them comes near the house.”

Geoff sighs heavily. “I’ll do it.”

Nobody protests as he gets up and walks out, limping a little on his bitten leg. Geoff sighs as he takes a seat on the sand outside the door, leaning up against the wall, staring out into the night. It’s pointless, of course - if anything did come, he wouldn’t be able to fight it off. The infected are strong, infamously so. 

But still, the fear doesn’t come. Geoff doesn’t see much to be afraid of anymore, he realises, as he sits there in the dirt and lets the awfulness of the whole thing hit him. No matter what happens, no matter how perilous things get out here, they’re all going to be dead within the month. All of them are bitten, infected. They all have something terrible and incurable writhing and growing inside them, spreading through their blood. Within a few weeks, they’ll all be insane. Within the month, dead. The mundane reality of it is almost impossible to process. 

Geoff takes a deep, steadying breath. By all rights, he should be perfectly fine right now. He should be in his bed back home, alone but alive and safe and uninfected. He should be able to carry on with his life as he always has. A part of his mind rebels against all this, screams  _ it isn’t fair!!! _ but Geoff knows that nothing is really fair anymore. 

Quarantining efforts have gone surprisingly well, considering the zombie apocalypse should be a pretty hard thing to contain. Cities are walled in, everybody checked over and over and over for infection (Geoff has had enough blood tests to last a lifetime, but today marked his very last one, and that’s a painful thought. They aren’t needed anymore - not for him. Not now). 

The infection always manages to slip through the cracks. Geoff woke up this morning, left his house. He walked to work just like every other day, ready to spend another boring shift serving coffee to depressed hipsters with shirts reading  _ ‘bite me now’ _ and  _ ‘the real infection is our society’  _ and  _ ‘I identify as a zombie inside’ _ and tired medical students (because all anybody studies nowadays is medicine). He was nearly there when something pounced on him from an alleyway, cold and dead and vicious, and then there was a horrible pain in his leg and the pavement against his back and screams and screams and screams-

And now he’s here. Dropped out in the middle of the desert to rot with eight other poor sods. 

Out of all the ways Geoff could have imagined dying, of course, this is the most likely. When people look at their future in 2067, they don’t see dying of old age or car crashes or cancer or heart failure. They wonder when the infection is going to finally overrun their city, and when they’re going to go insane and be starved out of their own body along with everybody else they know. Geoff just guesses that his bite came a little quicker than that. In a way, he’s glad everybody in the city is still alive. A little, selfish part of him wishes he could bring everybody in that goddamn place down with him.

But of course, there’s no time to mourn now. It happened, and there’s no way to stop the infection. No cure. All Geoff can do now is wait for death. 

The front door opens. Light spills out onto the sand, flickering like soft flames, and the british boy sits beside Geoff, closing the door behind him, folding his arms around his drawn-up knees. Neither of them speaks for a while. There’s not much Geoff can think of to say. He wonders if Gavin, Lindsay and Michael were together when it happened, whether one of them tried to protect the others. The thought is sad, startlingly so. Abruptly, Geoff doesn’t feel so numb. 

“Jeremy found a candle,” Gavin says, into his knees. “Still cold, though.” 

“Why’d you come out here then, dipshit?”

“I thought you’d be on your own!” Gavin defends, then sighs. “And Michael and Ryan are fighting. Gives me a headache.”

Geoff sighs. “Well, sorry to say this but I’m not very good company.”

“Really? Nah, you can’t be that bad…?”

“Geoff. Geoff Ramsey.”

“Gavin Tuggey-Jones.” Gavin grins, though there’s something sad about it.

“Tuggey-Jones? Which one’s yours?”

“None of ‘em. Those two bloody thought Tuggey-Jones sounds better than Free-Jones or Free-Tuggey, arseholes. And you can’t have a triple barrel name.”

“You can’t? That sucks.”

“Yeah, though Michael says Gavin Free-Tuggey-Jones sounds stupid. He’s a prick, though - don’t listen to him.”

Geoff snorts despite himself. “Sounds like you two have a loving relationship, huh?”

“Of course we do! It’s just… not your typical marriage.”

“I’d noticed.”

This makes Gavin laugh, a sound that makes him seem very young. The pair of them sit in comfortable silence for a while, the desert wind whistling in the quiet all around them. Everything is still. Inside, the yelling has stopped, though a little candlelight spills from the crack under the front door and casts the side of Gavin’s face into a soft, faded light.

“Where’d you live? Y’know, before all this.”

Geoff sighs. “NYC.”

“Ow. Rough, city, right? ‘Specially now.”

“Yeah. That’s an understatement.” Geoff glances at Gavin. “Used to have to keep a knife on me at all times, but everybody did, so it didn’t cause much hassle with metal detectors.”

Gavin winces. “We came from Austin. Things weren’t so bad down there. Still sucked, though. Sorry if Michael was making all that noise on the plane, by the way. He’s… not the best at controlling his temper.”

“Oh trust me, I’d noticed that too.”

They lapse into silence again. Gavin hugs his knees tighter. He’s lanky, skinny to the point of it being slightly worrying, but most people living in cities nowadays are hardly rolling it it. Most people aren’t doing to great no matter where they live now. Geoff always used to measure it by which finger he could get to touch his thumb around his wrist, and stopped when it ended up with a consistent, disappointing result - index, index, index, day after miserable day. But everybody is thin nowadays, really, so he’s nothing special. Not really. 

Suddenly, a sound breaks the silence - something shifts out in the darkened desert, a sound like a subdued groan accompanying the noise. Geoff breaks out of his thoughts and freezes up, eyes going wide, barely breathing. It feels like somebody sets all of his nerves alight all at once. Gavin grabs his arm hard, fingers wrapping around his wrist, index touching thumb. Both of them stay completely still, silent, terrified that one movement could bring out whatever creature is out there. 

Geoff knows a lot about the infected, of course. He was attacked by one less than twelve hours ago, bitten even (the bite stings at the memory). When you get bit, it isn’t like in the movies. It takes weeks, and before you turn dead and brainless, you go mad. The worst way to die. Then, your heart stops beating and you end up looking like a  _ Thriller  _ music video reject and you could probably be called a ‘zombie’ - one like in the Walking Dead, an old TV show, not just an insane person. 

Geoff doesn’t know what he’s scared of more out there - something dead, or something alive.

Another groan, deep and scratchy. Gavin’s grip on Geoff’s arm tightens, tight enough to bruise, and that’s the only warning Geoff gets. 

Then, the kid is scrambling towards the door, pulling Geoff with him, fumbling with the doorknob madly, hands shaking.  _ Something  _ jumps out of the darkness, screeching and snarling and inhuman, eyes black - pale, spindly arms, bony hands with fingernails like claws grab for Gavin, raking down the side of his arm. Gavin yelps with pain and the thing lunges into his face, snapping its jaws an inch in front of his eyes, hands crushing down on drawn-in shoulders. Gavin’s eyes are wide - green and clear and filled with terror - and Geoff sees red. 

The next thing he knows, he’s on top of the thing. It’s pale, almost marble white, with bloody nails and wild eyes, pupils bleeding out into the iris with infection. Its face is barely a face anymore, wrinkled and torn like paper that has been soaked in coffee and shriveled in on itself. Geoff would be horrified, stunned by the  _ thing _ that was somehow once human, but he’s too busy beating the living shit out of it. One punch barely stuns the thing; the next makes impact with a heavy, sickening crunch. The creature slumps back, still struggling, and Geoff grabs for a rock on the ground beside him, holds it with shaking fingers, brings it above his head and swings it down. The rock meets skull with a horrible crunch - once, twice, three times - and the thing stops struggling and goes still. 

Geoff goes cold, falls back, the rock slipping from his fingers. He realises, as the world fades back, that there’s blood on his hands and on his face. There’s sand on his knees, which are on either side of the monster, and he scrambles backwards, suddenly desperate to get away from it.  _ I just killed it. I just killed it _ . 

Then, Gavin is there, yelling about something and checking Geoff for injuries and asking,  _ did it bite you, did it bite you?! _ as though that even matter when they’re all already damned. Geoff shakes his head numbly, arms suddenly filled with grateful, trembling brit, Gavin’s wiry limbs are everywhere as he hugs him as though Geoff just saved his life. They sit there on the sand, huddled together, and Geoff realises numbly, with a sense of detachment, that he did. He still feels cold. This might be shock, he thinks vaguely. It doesn’t feel much like shock. All he feels is hollow. 

_ I just killed somebody _ .

The front door bangs open and Michael is standing there, staring at the scene in front of him. He seems to add up the dots quickly. Lindsay moves forwards, puts a hand on Gavin’s shoulder, tells him to let go - Gavin is shaking his head, trembling, and Geoff reaches up numbly to hug him back as they are surrounded by the others, all asking questions and talking and yelling and arguing-

Geoff finally manages to pull himself together. Extracting himself from Gavin, who is quickly surrounded by Michael and Lindsay, he shakes off Jack and Jeremy and shoulders his way back into the house, stepping over the zombie corpse as he goes. The blank, wide eyes stare up at him as he passes, unseeing and black, collapsed skull grotesquely misshapen like a severely dented pan. Trying not to look at it, not to think about it, not to think about  _ anything _ , Geoff walks into the living room, sits on the couch and stares at the candle, as though if he can blind himself with its feeble light, he can get that image out of his mind. His hands are still shaking, body still cold - everything is aching and numb at the same time. He realises he’s panting like he’s run a marathon. 

Alfredo, who is still sitting down across the room, tells him, “You look like shit.”

Geoff can’t even come up with a smart answer. 

One by one, the others traipse back in. Jeremy stares awkwardly at his bloody hands as he sits on the other side of the room - Ryan and Jack sit beside him, and Jack tells him that the others are going to be coming in in a minute. 

Geoff doesn’t manage to keep his eyes open long enough to find out. He falls asleep and dreams of black eyes and planes and dust and Gavin’s young green eyes, and how all of this got so horribly wrong. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed!! My tumblr is @paox <3 please leave a comment if you can!


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